I'll take some flak for the word I used, but it's such an infuriating game at a lot of times and I don't understand those that blindly defend it or dismiss the issues present in the game.

I bought it, I'm playing it, I'll beat it, it's functional...but, damn, if there aren't all sorts of limitations, random quirks, rough edges, or poor design choices in the game. Compared to earlier Thief games or the overall market, the advances in engine and design over the past fifteen years, it's nowhere close to being a great game. Some items are preference, but other comments I just have a hard time taking at face value - talking about how good the engine is, TB's claims of getting over 120 FPS on a single Titan at maximum settings, non-stealth fans talking about how great this game is, etc.

They give you missions early on that you won't have the tools for, preventing you from obtaining 100%, and either forcing you to play the same level over again or forcing you to automatically finish with a lower ranking. It's a "hub" that is completely fractured into pieces of wildly inconsistent design. I spent 5 minutes figure out how to even get to a specific area - figuring out the map and all the load screens and window quicktime events that somehow connected to one another - to have it be one of the moments where the character just decided to drop down rather than jumping across, requiring me to go through the whole direction puzzle again. Why do some areas, specifically talking about non-missions areas, respawn items while other remain in a cleared state? Why did my rope arrow disappear from one area, but not the others? Given that rope arrows are a finite resource and can only be used in the developer-designated areas, why are there some areas with few/no anchor points and other areas with numerous anchor points, requiring backtracking to a supply vendor, meaning more map/hub fighting? For all the backtracking required through the various locked off window sequences, was it really important to have you hold E, wait for the canned patting animation to play (it's a damned window, just like all the others,) to then spam the E button, and then go through another animation? Speaking of animation, why is the game so obsessed with showing off the character model - this game needs to be fun and challenging, not slow and artistic. Did they really remove the ability to jump and then design a challenge around walking past floorplates? This entire corner is in dark shadow; why, when in this one specific area, do I become fully exposed? Why do they keep adding whole new areas to the hub that I already explored; how am I supposed to learn the routes if the game jus throws out connecting points willy nilly? Dear lord, does this one vertical area really have five different windows, all linking to separate areas?

I could go on and one, but it just speaks to how infuriating the game can be, how inconsistent the design is. And these are only touching on some of the things I stumbled into while trying to legitimately play the game. While fiddling around with items and combat yesterday, I easily identified a number of other issues.It's not crap, but there are so many terrible design choices in play.Having unhindered fun in so few moments of my playing ,Ray